Baghdad Denies It’s Holding Missing TV Crew From CBS : Media: A deserter reportedly tells of foreigners being taken into Iraqi custody. The network asks Gorbachev and CNN to help in the search.

Iraqi officials denied that they are holding a CBS-TV crew that has been missing for a week and said they have no information about the four-member news team, a Cable News Network correspondent in Baghdad has reported.

CBS, quoting only a high-ranking Saudi official, reported Monday that an Iraqi deserter told interrogators he saw four foreigners taken into custody by Iraqi troops. The official said he believes the four could be the television crew.

Correspondent Bob Simon, producer Peter Bluff, cameraman Roberto Alvarez and sound man Juan Caldera disappeared Jan. 21 while covering the Gulf War. They were traveling without military escort near occupied Kuwait.

“We are doing all we can to determine if, indeed, Bob Simon and his crew are in Iraqi hands, and if he is, that he be brought to Baghdad and shipped home,” CNN’s Peter Arnett reported by telephone in a broadcast Sunday.

“The Iraqis are saying they do not have him, or they don’t have any information about him at this point,” said Arnett, who has been reporting from Baghdad since the war began earlier this month.

Arnett said that the director of Iraq’s Information Ministry told him that “they have nothing in their intelligence sources, and military and government sources, about the presence of the CBS team in Kuwait.”

A Saudi military patrol found the crew’s unoccupied car last week. Saudi officials said Friday that the crew apparently had been heading into occupied Kuwait, more than 350 miles southeast of Baghdad.

CBS spokesman Tom Goodman, meanwhile, said the network has appealed for help in getting information about the missing newsmen to U.S. and Saudi military officials, and to Iraqi officials in Washington, France, Japan and Italy and at the United Nations.

The network also wrote to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and is seeking Iraqi permission to let producer Larry Doyle go to Baghdad to seek information on the missing men, Goodman said.

Goodman said CNN “has been very helpful” in relaying CBS requests for information to Iraqi officials in Baghdad.

Simon, 49, with CBS since 1967, has long covered the Middle East. He also covered the Vietnam War and fighting in Lebanon.

Also on Monday, a five-member CNN crew arrived in Baghdad after traveling overland from Jordan with a portable satellite transmitter, CNN spokesman Steve Haworth said. The crew, headed by correspondent Margaret Lowrie, will back up Arnett and set up the satellite link to allow live TV pictures from Baghdad.

Iraq gave CNN’s crew permission to enter the country with the unit.

Iraq’s satellite TV transmitter was knocked out during air raids shortly after the war began. Arnett has been able to report live only by satellite phone, always subject to Iraqi censorship.

Iraqi officials are trying to get the video footage their crews are making out to the world for broadcast.

Correspondent Dennis Murphy, reporting from Amman on Sunday’s “NBC Nightly News,” said the Iraqi government “is hand-delivering” to Jordanian TV officials videotapes of what Iraq says is bomb damage in civilian areas.